Six weeks ago, a man living in Germany and calling himself KenGrok, announced a fascinating discovery on a Google Earth Community forum.

Poring over satellite images of China on the free Google Earth service, he came across a strange plot of land - approximately 900 metres by 700 metres, about the size of six Sydney Cricket Grounds.

The land, which KenGrok said was landscape that had been modelled for military purposes, is situated near the town of Huangyangtan about 35 kilometres from Yinchuan, the capital of the autonomous region of Ningxia, in northern China.

Nearby, there is a substantial facility complete with rows of red-roofed buildings, scores of what look to be military trucks and a large compound with elevated lookout posts and a large communications tower.

The land was contoured in a way that was out of sync with the surrounding countryside.

It appeared to be a mountainous region, complete with snow-capped peaks and glacial valleys dotted with numerous lakes.

Yet this piece of land was slap bang in the middle of a largely arid area due west of the rich alluvial plains bordering the upper reaches of the Yellow River.

A fellow Google Earth enthusiast suggested that the topography indicated that this was probably a model of land on one of China's frontiers.

KenGrok went looking and two weeks later came back with the answer. The swatch was a scale model of 157,500 square kilometres of territory in and around China's Aksai Chin border region that abuts India and Pakistan.

I noticed it right away, because the land doesn't match. Then it struck me: Why not? When Google Maps covers up something, they normally blur it so that it is invisible or just put grey over it. However, someone has gone to great lengths to not show what is under that land. Very strange.

We are sorry but we do not have maps at this zoom level for this region.
We are sorry but we do not have maps at this zoom level for this region.
We are sorry but we do not have maps at this zoom level for this region.
We are sorry but we do not have maps at this zoom level for this region.

I noticed it right away, because the land doesn't match. Then it struck me: Why not? When Google Maps covers up something, they normally blur it so that it is invisible or just put grey over it. However, someone has gone to great lengths to not show what is under that land. Very strange.

The only part "I think I understood" was that it's the same map, and nobody would zoom in on the mountains because they're boring?

While doing so would reveal those military fields or?

Click to expand...

The square area in the first map has the mountains of the second map instead of what is really there. The mountains shown in the first map are NOT there in reality - their graphic is being used to hide whatever really is there.

The square area in the first map has the mountains of the second map instead of what is really there. The mountains shown in the first map are NOT there in reality - their graphic is being used to hide whatever really is there.

If you look around the area of the "fake mountain field" one, particularly to the North West, there are some other strange markings on the land, cant really tell what they are, definitly manmade though.